For antenna design and evaluation according to existing and established methods, four groups of people are generally involved. The first group is the antenna designers, who design antenna module based on the application, carrier frequency, antenna gain and other various requirements. For terminal MIMO antenna design, the characteristics such as antenna radiation pattern and antenna element isolation are the key parameters. The fabricated antenna module is evaluated by another group called the measurement group, who performs a series of field tests so that an antenna is tested in real channel environments. The antenna designers, based on the feedback from the measurement group, improve their designs so that the field test results meet the requirements.
The designed antenna module is delivered to the hardware system design group, who designs specific wireless hardware systems for the given application. For hardware system design, the characteristics such as capacity, BER (bit-error rate), and FER (frame-error rate) are the target metrics to optimize. The final wireless hardware system with antenna mounted is traditionally measured and tested in real radio environments by the measurement group. Specific measurement platform is required to perform the measurement on a series of measurement sites. The choices of the sites should cover the target channel environments of the wireless hardware system. On each site, the wireless hardware system is tested with different configurations and the antenna module is tested with different orientations. And the results will be feedback to the system designers as well as the antenna designers to improve wireless system designs and antenna designs.
The fourth group is CAD (Computer Aided Design) tool designers. To enable a fast design cycle, CAD tools, especially certain antenna electromagnetic (EM) simulators, are generally used in the antenna design. The EM simulators generate the antenna characteristics based on antenna structure and antenna materials. The antenna characteristics generated include antenna radiation pattern, antenna transmission characteristics or reflection characteristics such as MIMO antenna element isolation, antenna gain, insertion loss, return loss, and VSWR (voltage standing wave ratio). The antenna designers use the EM simulators to find suitable antenna physical dimensions and antenna materials to achieve satisfactory antenna characteristics.